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Making "Nature" is the first book to chronicle the foundation and development of Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific institutions. Now nearing its hundred and fiftieth year of publication, Nature is the international benchmark for scientific publication. Its contributors include Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, and Stephen Hawking, and it has published many of the most important discoveries in the history of science, including articles on the structure of DNA, the discovery of the neutron, the first cloning of a mammal, and the human genome.

But how did Nature become such an essential institution? In Making "Nature," Melinda Baldwin charts the rich history of this extraordinary publication from its foundation in 1869 to current debates about online publishing and open access. This pioneering study not only tells Nature's story but also sheds light on much larger questions about the history of science publishing, changes in scientific communication, and shifting notions of "scientific community." Nature, as Baldwin demonstrates, helped define what science is and what it means to be a scientist.

In the last two decades, digital technologies have made it possible for anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to rapidly and inexpensively self-publish a book. Once a stigmatized niche activity, self-publishing has grown explosively. Hobbyists and professionals alike have produced millions of books, circulating them through e-readers and the web. What does this new flood of books mean for publishing, authors, and readers? Some lament the rise of self-publishing because it tramples the gates and gatekeepers who once reserved publication for those who met professional standards. Others tout authors’ new freedom from the narrow-minded exclusivity of traditional publishing. Critics mourn the death of the author; fans celebrate the democratization of authorship.

Drawing on eight years of research and interviews with more than eighty self-published writers, Mass Authorship avoids the polemics, instead showing how writers are actually thinking about and dealing with this brave new world. Timothy Laquintano compares the experiences of self-publishing authors in three distinct genres—poker strategy guides, memoirs, and romance novels—as well as those of writers whose self-published works hit major bestseller lists. He finds that the significance of self-publishing and the challenge it presents to traditional publishing depend on the aims of authors, the desires of their readers, the affordances of their platforms, and the business plans of the companies that provide those platforms.

In drawing a nuanced portrait of self-publishing authors today, Laquintano answers some of the most pressing questions about what it means to publish in the twenty-first century: How do writers establish credibility in an environment with no editors to judge quality? How do authors police their copyrights online without recourse to the law? How do they experience Amazon as a publishing platform? And how do they find an audience when, it sometimes seems, there are more writers than readers? 
 

In this sophisticated application of modern Marxist thought, N. N. Feltes demonstrates the determining influence of nineteenth-century publishing practices on the Victorian novel. His dialectical analysis leads to a comprehensive explanation of the development of capitalist novel production into the twentieth century.

Feltes focuses on five English novels: Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Eliot's Middlemarch, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Forster's Howards End. Published at approximately twenty year intervals between 1836 and 1920, they each represent a different first-publication format: part-issue, three-volume, bimonthly, magazine-serial, and single-volume. Drawing on publishing, economic, and literary history, Feltes offers a broad, synthetic explanation of the relationship between the production and format of each novel, and the way in which these determine, in the last instance, the ideology of the text.

Modes of Production in Victorian Novels provides a Marxist structuralist analysis of historical events and practices described elsewhere only empirically, and traces their relationship to literary texts which have been analyzed only idealistically, thus setting these familiar works firmly and perhaps permanently into a framework of historic materialism.